Some nudge for the cultural pessimist teachers I had.
How To Recognize When Tech Is Leading Us Down a ‘Slippery Slope’.
Does a new technology pose serious dangers — or are we just overreacting? Philosopher Evan Selinger has some ideas on how to tell the two apart.
Coding for non-programmers: Why we need better GUI automation tools.
Now we're back at a place where I see people often wasting a ton of time doing exactly the sort of thing computers were supposed to prevent. Endless clicking and dragging, mind-numbing repetition of selecting check-boxes and copy/pasting values in form fields. The ideas present in technology like HyperCard and AppleScript have never been more needed in normal non-technical peoples lives, but there just doesn't seem to be any tooling for it in a browser world. Why?
With about half a century of life, the Unix shell is pervasive and entrenched in our computing infrastructure—with recent virtualization and containerization trends only propelling its use. A fresh surge of academic research highlights show potential for tackling long-standing open problems that are central to the shell and enable further progress.
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NFT FTW?
The Internet of Grift (via densediscovery.com).
No amount of anecdotes about someone making a bajillion dollars on a picture of a donkey’s ass is going to convince me that this is a good thing.
How to get useful answers to your questions.
Sell! Sell! Sell!
Visualizing the products that won capitalism.
Bugs in our Pockets (application/pdf, 3,698 KB) : The Risks of Client-Side Scanning.
In this report, we argue that CSS neither guarantees efficacious crime prevention nor prevents surveillance. Indeed, the effect is the opposite. CSS by its nature creates serious security and privacy risks for all society while the assistance it can provide for law enforcement is at best problematic. There are multiple ways in which client-side scanning can fail, can be evaded, and can be abused.
The housing theory of everything.
Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.
How capitalism took hold of graphic design, and how to escape from it.
Capitalism could not exist without the coins, notes, documents, graphics, interfaces, branding and advertisements; artefacts that have been (partly) created by graphic designers. Even anti-consumerist strategies such as social design and speculative design are being appropriated within capitalist societies to serve economic growth. It seems that design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources.